Welcome to my blog!

We find ourselves in challenging times. To meet them more easily, I believe involves challenging ourselves to move beyond old, established habits and patterns.

Perhaps I am a bit late fully entering into the 21st century by starting my blog now, in 2010! In that my work and message has so much to do with slowing down and settling into a deeper knowing beyond and prior to our cultural modes, it may be appropriate to step extra slowly into the world of blogging and other cyber realities.

I suspect that, if you are drawn to my blog and the words here, you may also value this slower, deeper state we are all capable of. I invite you to read on and regularly, and hope the words below can support you in enhancing your ability to be, even in the midst of all the doing required in our modern world.

Thursday, 5 January 2012

Shedding the Skins of Security: A New Year Begins

A new year is born. An old one passes.

I spent new years eve in silence on a week-long meditation
retreat. As I reviewed the highlights of the dying year, my mind recovered the
wave of death I encountered in the final months of 2011.

Early in October, I decided to do an internet search for a
dear friend I had lost touch with. Eva and I had studied Occupational Therapy
together at the University of Toronto. We were the same age, our birthdays
close to each other, and we had offered refuge to each other as two creative
misfits in a more conventional, medicalized world.

We kept in touch through the years often enough to delight in
the unexpected parallels in our lives. I found myself drawn to Dance/Movement
Therapy and Eva began using music as therapy. I learned about native American
spiritual paths and Eva married a First Nations man and embraced the his
culture wholeheartedly. Our friendship represented a certain soothing security for
someone like me who changed homes and occupations so frequently. It was good to
know there was a kindred soul out there who could understand.

Things changed after Eva’s sister suddenly died of breast
cancer. Soon after, we lost touch. About once a year, I would try finding Eva
online to see if she had decided to venture into the 21st century
from her back woods log cabin, but I never found her, until October. In the
back of my mind and heart, I had carried a fear that Eva had followed her
sister, so it was and wasn’t a shock to come across her obituary.

No, it’s not true. Death is always a shock. Just like birth.
One can never be fully prepared for the mystery.

The greater shock came the next day, when I discovered Steve
Jobs had died. Again, his death was expected. The shock was on another level.
The intellect had no problem with the event. The heart balked.

Steve Jobs, like Eva, was exactly my age.

We are all interconnected…

Resonance is a wonderful thing. It can also be painful. I
choose for my heart to be so open that I feel the pain of others passing me on
the street. I find that allowing myself to feel the pain also enables the
depths of joy. Where, however, does other become me?

Learning about someone’s death probably always offers the
potential for existential re-evaluation and reflection. When the dead person
has something in common with us, the offering is potentially greater.

Steve and Eva were my age. And they were dead. Was there a
message here?

The message for me was about life. I had been witnessing my
father’s slow, dragged out approach to death for some years. This had offered
the ongoing gift of remembering each moment the preciousness of life. Now, this
preciousness was highlighted. Were Eva and I still on parallel paths after all
these years? We never know, even if we smugly pretend otherwise, when our
moment will come.

To quote Jobs,

Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all
fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to
die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to
lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Interestingly, this quote was read to us at the meditation
retreat last week. What does it take for us to remember we will die? How easily
we lose ourselves in the tasks and activities of everyday life, forgetting what
may be more important.

More Reminders

Around the time that I found Eva’s obituary and Steve Jobs
died, I received a sad email from my father stating starkly, “Mary has died.”

Mary was my mother’s closest friend. Like Eva and me, Mary
and my mother (and the Queen my
mother would include) were exactly the same age. Their birthdays were a few
weeks apart. Mary had been remarkably well and active at 85, and was always
there to support my parents in countless ways. She had suddenly become quite
ill and died. Just like that. She was gone. My father seemed to take this as a
message. My mother cried.

A few weeks later, on November 4, my father also died. He
had been in and out of hospital repeatedly. Again, his death was not
unexpected. In fact, his doctors would reportedly ask him, “What are you still
doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!” One of my father’s quips was that he
couldn’t die yet. “I still have a few more people to make miserable,” he declared.
I guess by November he had made enough people miserable and was ready.

I had witnessed him move into readiness, visiting and
Skyping frequently the last few years. As I watched my father struggle with
breath the day before he died, I was reminded of the many times I had tracked
his breath from his living room floor. He would sleep in his reclining chair as
I did my Continuum dive in the morning. I would hear his breathing, loud and
uneven, his mouth open, in a desperate gesture to bring in even a little more
oxygen. Sometimes I felt compelled to look closely to check if he was still
there. And then another breath would come.

Holding my father’s body after he died was a profound
experience I shall be forever grateful for. As a cranial practitioner, I felt I
was being given an incredible gift. His body still warm, I sensed the fluid in
his tissues no longer guided by the Breath of Life. The energetic midline I am
so used to orienting to with my clients had disappeared. I could feel life
energy gradually lifting off the body and, eventually, the tissues beginning to
dry out as the warmth of life diminished.

On the retreat last week, I had the opportunity to sit with
a human skeleton provided as a tool to support our awareness of the
impermanence of being. The skeleton’s mouth was open like my father’s,
sometimes smiling, sometimes smirking, sometimes apparently at peace as she
watched us in our slow walking meditation back and forth, back and forth in
front of her. What did my father watch now?

And Still More

The final shock of the year was when my mother’s other
closest friend died two and half weeks after my father. They had been in the
hospital at the same time, on different floors, tracking each other’s progress
as best they could.

Who plans these things? What cruel intention took these
people from my mother within such a short period of time? How much loss and
suffering can one person endure? How fully can I feel her pain, sharing without
becoming lost?

What determines when a life ends? My father had said he was
still alive because the man upstairs and the man downstairs were still arguing
about who was to get him.

Decisions are made. Upstairs or down, decisions are made.
Life passes. Life arises. Life, like all things, must pass.

I was stunned when I wrote to my students to postpone the
classes planned for the last two months to hear from so many that they, too,
were being affected by death. Decisions are made. Changes happen. We love and
we lose. The heart cries. It seems it is a time of many changes, many losses,
many transitions and many tears for many people.

Gifts in our Midst

Again and again, I return to the offering of this
challenging time. Things must change. Life is movement. If we hold on to what
has been, we cannot breathe. Life is rhythm. I am reminded of Emilie Conrad’s
refusal to make someone a Continuum teacher until they have died enough times.
We must be willing to shed old skins to allow the new to come forth.

The Buddha encouraged us to be aware of our attachments. We
cling to what we know. We hold on to the familiar in desperate hope that it
will hold on to us in moments of danger. We seek security in what we know and
in so doing create a profound insecurity.

And so a new year arrives. A new year of unknowns. How do we
prepare? What do we need to let go of in order to fully meet what arises next?
What skins need shedding? What seeds crave water?

Can we just know that the mystery will express itself
however it does and that we are that? Can we just remember that we, too, will
die when the time comes? And if that time were now, would we have accomplished
what we intended? Would our relationships be in order? Would we have said what
we meant to say to that person? What is most important to have completed, not
by the end of 2012, but by the end of this moment?

And his one?

And this.

One.

Thank you. Thank you for traveling the world path with me
and reading these words. If I were to die in the next minute, perhaps I would
have said more of what needed to be said.